Easter, Evolution and a 14-hour work day.

Easter has come and gone and I successfully absorbed my usual 30 pounds of chocolate in a 12 hour time period - a true test of will power and endurance that I train for each year. Now despite this being one of my first Easters away from home - I was luckily able to create a couple of my home traditions. Thanks to my family I had home grown Australian chocolate to eat at 8am on Sunday morning - but I had to work a bit harder to get my traditional hot-cross buns. Undeterred by the 3.5hour preparation time warning - deciding this was a generous time for those too lazy to work quickly in the kitchen - I set about creating the worlds finest hot-cross buns. 5 hours later I put the finishing touches on a dozen strangely shaped pieces of dough. Now given that the recipe asked that you allow the dough to rise in a warm place approximately 12 separate times - I had a chance to indulge in Jen's traditional Easter practices. So there we stood decorating hard-boiled eggs - trying desperately to hide the extreme pride we were taking in our artwork - before hiding them and sending Jen on a egg hunt. As an added incentive I informed her that the eggs we painted were lunch - and that we wouldn't be able to eat until she found them all. It's funny how in Australia the prospect of egg hunts and decorating eggs was largely abandoned in favor of simply handing over the eggs so that children could make themselves sick without having to expend any extra energy. Definitely the way it should be.
This past week also enabled us to venture to a few interesting presentations on campus - with Hollywood director Haskell Wexler in town presenting his documentary 'Who Needs Sleep' - a movie based on the sweatshop conditions that many of those working on movies deal with. Amazingly enough - these people were required to work so many hours - that when they began to demand fairer conditions - it was to have their hours reduced to 14 hours per day - crazy.
The next night we were fortunate enough to see a lecture given by Kenneth Miller - one of the big name players in the controversy surrounding evolution and religion. It turned out to be a pretty educational talk - complete with a clip of him being interviewed on The Colbert Report - damn entertaining.

Pictured: Hot-Cross Buns and success in the egg hunt.